As far as Warren knew, the world had already collapsed hundreds of years before the System. What remained were scattered pockets of civilization, fragnts clinging to mory, resource, and routine. The cities had fallen. The networks still humd in so sectors. Corporations, where they still existed, sold the lie of convenience as progress. It all looked intact until the seams split. So parts of the old world still clung on, cracked, barely breathing, familiar beneath the ruin. But they were ghosts. Echoes. The kind that let people pretend it hadn't truly ended.
But even older than those was the Empire. Vast, ordered, brutal. The last scaffolds of civilization before the great unravel. They had cities with borders, roads that still lit up at night, and satellites that obeyed commands.
It was from their vaults that most of the surviving tech ca, Imperial caches sealed in alloy bunkers, scattered like myths through the ruins. When soone cracked one, it changed the balance of power overnight.
They built machines no one understood anymore. Modular tools. Self-learning code. Black-box weapons no scavver dared touch unless they were desperate or mad. Emp tech ca from them. Hard-coded tools of control.
The System didn’t make those things. It adapted them. Stole their bones.
In the final days before the System, the Empire was the only stability left. People migrated toward it's reach like moths to the last working lamps. It had fallen. But for a while, it held.
Warren had never seen it firsthand. Just heard stories, places where the clean water still ran, where drones still patrolled, where law was asured in firepower. They weren’t kind. But they worked. Until they didn’t.
Before the System, there were salvage kingdoms. Pop-up city-states built on the bones of better eras. Markets made of junk. Dominions ruled by whoever held the last working battery.
People didn't thrive. They recycled. They burned old data for heat and prayed over broken plastic like relics.
Roads ant nothing. GPS had long since failed. Travel was a ritual of risk. You moved only if you had to, and only if you were desperate.
The sun didn't shine the sa. The skies were heavy with static, clouded by the remnants of things too big to burn clean. Towers pierced the cloudbanks like rusted knives, so still blinked with red lights that no longer ant anything.
So outposts were myth. A clean spring. A room with power. An antenna that caught whispers from satellites no one controlled.
Children were born feral in places like this. Raised on the edge of mory. They learned to walk by stepping over bones. Their lullabies were screams.
The old tech wasn’t holy, but it was close. People bled over circuit boards, bartered for interface keys carved from scrap. A working screen was a miracle. A lamp that still lit up ant safety.
Every survivor carried a story of soone who tried to go back. To rebuild. They all ended the sa way, buried under collapse. The world didn’t want to be rebuild. It just wanted to be forgotten.
That was the world Warren had grown up in. One where every kindness was a negotiation, and every promise rusted in the rain.
So when the System rolled out, people didn’t ask why. They asked how long before it was their turn.
They called it the "Integration Phase." Neural links. Behavioral syncing. Imrsive overlays. One global interface to unify thought, habit, instinct. They said it would fix everything.
And for a while, it almost did.
Then ca the desyncs. The blackouts. The people who walked off rooftops with serene smiles because the voices in their heads said it was ti to log out. People started vanishing in crowds, glitching out, freezing in place, bleeding from the eyes. mory corruption, they called it. A side effect.
Warren rembered overhearing rumors whispered around a scrap-barrel fire when the final patch rolled out. People cheered. Prayed. Drank cheap synthetic whiskey and stared at the screens like salvation was coded in pixels.
The next morning, half the city was dead.
The System’s promises hadn’t just failed, they’d torn the world apart. Those who weren’t dead quickly learned to survive, but those who had once walked the streets with certainty and comfort were now scattered in a broken, desperate mass. The wealthy, the powerful, the ones who had believed that the System was a cure, they didn’t suffer like the others. Their tech still worked. Their connections were intact. They didn’t forget. Only the destitute, the scum, the poor, they were the ones who struggled, who beca expendable.
For them, the collapse didn’t start with the System, it had happened generations before. What followed was a slow erosion, not an explosion. Signals failed. Grids darkened. Sothing beneath their lives gave way, whatever had kept things stitched together simply stopped.
The collapse had no single na, no mont of clarity. Just absence, growing louder with each passing year, long before the System’s rise, this was just another evolution of decay.
The System arrived like a savior, but it wore a mask of math and code. It didn’t bring food or safety. It brought diagnostics. It ranked need. It quantified worth.
People didn’t get help. They got sorted.
Families were flagged as inefficient. Neighborhoods were marked unsalvageable. Resources were redirected toward places where people had more “value.”
Those in the wrong zones were left to rot.
Warren had watched entire blocks turn feral. Not from hunger but from being ignored. People who once lived structured lives, clung to order, whatever order was left went still. Like the world had pulled their plug. He didn’t co from that kind of world, but he understood what it ant to lose it.
In the early weeks, there were still so who believed. They scanned in, updated their chips, waited for updates that never ca. They stood in lines for food deliveries that had been a lie the whole ti.
Others burned out quickly. Ripped their chips out with rusted tools, tried to go dark. Most didn’t survive. The System didn’t chase them. It didn’t have to. Without connectivity, you didn’t exist.
And if you didn’t exist, you didn’t matter.
He had always known it was coming. He had seen the cracks, even before the System launched its grand rollout. He had seen the way people blindly embraced it, thought it would save them. And he’d known better. The System was never about saving people. It was about control. About turning everyone into a resource.
To the System, Warren wasn’t a person. He was a product, a commodity, and the worst part was, he needed it.
Now, the System still existed, fractured, unstable, but still reaching. What had collapsed was structure. The old sectors were gutted and shifting, overrun with the Broken, people whose chips had malfunctioned and turned them into mindless husks, twisted echoes of themselves. But to Warren, they were just another part of the terrain, predictable, avoidable, manageable. A resource to be exploited, if necessary. Sothing to map, use, or strip down when the need arose.
Weeks before the blood-soaked alleyway. Before the Ghost in the Mist.
He walked through what used to be a market strip, rows of tarp-strung fraworks, stripped bare and forgotten. His boots left heavy prints in the slush of water that pooled in uneven depressions and sunken tile.
It was raining.
The rain didn’t stop anymore. Not really. It just slowed now and then, like the sky was catching its breath.
Warren moved beneath a half-collapsed awning, ducking past twisted tal and soaked tarps still clinging to rusted scaffolding. He moved like he’d always lived there. Because he had.
Most structures leaned where ti had bent them. Makeshift bridges of snapped girders and fused cable arced above so crossings. Others were simply dead ends, sunken and filled with debris or waterlogged decay.
A row of long-abandoned carts stood fused to the mud, their wheels buried, their contents raided down to the frawork. One still bore a child’s handprint stained into tal by old dye or blood, it was impossible to tell.
Power lines sagged low overhead, spitting static into the mist. So sparked faintly. Most just buzzed like distant insects, droning through the haze.
He passed a slumped walkway riddled with half-lted mannequins, left behind by soone trying to scare off scavvers. Their faces were featureless. Their limbs burned. But soone had taken the ti to stand them in a circle, arms reaching out like a ritual.
Wind chis made from shattered glass and chain-link clinked faintly from a window fra three stories up. No one had claid the sound in a long ti.
Below, drain grates coughed steam. The air rising from them carried chemical bitterness, burned filtration foam or leaking battery guts. It made Warren’s eyes sting for a mont before the wind shifted.
Every now and then, he spotted the remnants of ssages etched into walls with scorched wire. Not writing. Coordinates. Or warnings. One simply read: "SLEEP UNDERGROUND. THEY DON’T." He knew that was a lie. The Broken didn’t have habits, not like people thought. They followed noise, heat, sotis nothing at all. But Warren knew better. During the day, most of them retreated underground into collapsed tro lines, old sub-complexes, the deep hollow systems beneath the surface. They stayed low, twitching in the dark, waiting. So ca back up. Others didn’t need to.
A scavenger’s tent flapped in a recessed stairwell, torn in half, the bedding soaked and scattered. It hadn’t been long. But long enough.
Every corner held history written in damage. And Warren read it like scripture.
A figure moved just out of sight, half-shadowed behind a bent support beam. Wrapped in rags. Holding sothing long and sharp. They didn’t make a sound, and Warren didn’t stop. The deal was simple: don’t interfere, don’t get noticed.
Near an old support pillar, a girl crouched beside a barrel fire too wet to burn. She was holding an empty can to her mouth, whispering into it like a comm. Her eyes tracked Warren, but she didn’t flinch.
A pair of figures crouched beneath a plastic overhang. One shivering, the other keeping watch with a bent crowbar across their knees. Their eyes didn’t follow Warren. They stayed low, heads down. Survivors knew better than to track strangers.
Farther on, a man sat on a ledge with his hands in his lap and his eyes wide open. He didn’t blink. His mouth was stained with sothing dark. The rain didn’t bother him.
Warren passed a cracked canopy rigged into a lean-to. A child peeked from inside, holding a tal fork like a weapon. The adult next to them didn’t move. Maybe asleep. Maybe not.
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Soone had made a nest from old carpet and scavenged tubing inside a collapsed stairwell. Warren only noticed them because of the breathing. Shallow. Deliberate. Not scared, just hiding.
A figure with a limping gait disappeared between two rust-streaked panels ahead. Their leg dragged. Their cloak was made of patchwork umbrellas. Warren let them vanish. If they made it, they earned it.
Behind him, a voice muttered sothing broken and slurred. Not to him. To themselves. Or to soone long dead. Warren didn’t look back.
He paused near a cracked mirror bolted to a leaning support beam. It didn’t reflect much, but it was enough to check behind him. Movent always ant risk.
A weathered slab was mounted on a rotted wall nearby, sothing etched into tal, old and oxidized. Most of it was unreadable, streaked with corrosion, but Warren recognized the shape of the System's insignia burned into its surface. Whether it was a boundary marker or leftover protocol didn’t matter. Soone, once, had tried to stake claim.
He stepped over a crumpled chassis, once a security unit, now just a corroded tangle of synthetic muscle and armorplate. Soone had carved a word into its chestplate. 'Liar.'
The scent of blood lingered. Not fresh. Old. Like sothing had bleed out days ago and left a scar on the air.
Warren moved through it all like it was natural. His pace was slow but deliberate.
Up ahead, a rusted drone casing hung from power lines like a wasp’s nest. It buzzed faintly with dying circuitry, eyes blinking red in a loop.
The world had broken, but Warren was still here. He had adapted.
He moved on, stepping lightly through the wreckage, until he spotted sothing in the distance. A figure hunched, stumbling, draped in a waterlogged coat. Their gait was uneven. Survival clung to them like mold.
Warren’s eyes narrowed. The figure was ragged, desperate, just another casualty of the world, scavenging, barely holding on. But desperation made people dangerous. This one, though weak and frightened, was still a threat. That made the choice simple.
He reached into his pack, retrieving the half-empty water bottle he’d salvaged earlier. The liquid sloshed softly, just enough to make a thirsty man act without thinking. He tilted the bottle to his lips, slow and deliberate.
The figure noticed him imdiately. Eyes wide. Shoulders rigid. Every part of them locked on the movent of the bottle like it was the only thing in the world.
“Please… just a sip… I’m… I’m dying of thirst, ” the figure croaked, voice ragged from exposure.
Warren didn’t answer.
He’d seen that look too many tis, people pushed to the edge, stripped of logic. There was always a line where the plea turned into a threat. This one was close.
And then they moved.
A sudden, clumsy lunge. Hands outstretched, fingers curled like claws toward the water.
Warren stepped back and let his body turn with it, twisting the montum. He didn’t drop the bottle. He didn’t spill a drop.
The figure stumbled forward. Desperation outweighed caution now. They didn’t stop to think.
They never did.
The first strike ca fast. Warren brought his knee up into the figure’s stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out but not kill. He needed to be sure. Needed to know if it was just thirst driving them or sothing worse.
The figure gasped, folded in on themselves, then clawed at him again. The breathless wheeze turned into a snarl. They weren’t begging now.
Warren’s truncheon was in his hand before the figure could recover. In his grip, it ant the end of things.
He swung low across the knees, sending the figure crumpling into the sludge. They hit the ground hard, shoulder first, then rolled, arms still flailing toward him.
“Didn’t have to, ” they rasped, coughing up rainwater and mud.
Warren didn’t answer. He crouched beside them instead. Close enough to sll the rot beneath the coat. Not infection. Hunger. Rot from the inside out.
“Nothing left, ” the figure murmured, barely above a whisper. “They took it. Everything.”
It wasn’t clear who they ant, raiders, the System, soone else. It didn’t matter. The story was always the sa.
The figure tried to lift their head. Warren t their gaze and saw nothing clear behind it. Just fog. The kind that cos from too long in the cold, too long without reason.
He almost let them go. Almost.
Then their hand shot out, not for the water, but for the pocket knife tucked near Warren’s belt.
He moved fast. The truncheon ca down once, clean. Bone cracked. It was precise. Satisfying. The kind of hit that didn't waste motion or aning. He felt it in his wrist, the transfer of power, the way the body folded under command.
There was a mont in the swing right before contact when everything fell quiet. A simple truth of motion and intent. It was a feeling Warren knew well. And liked.
The figure spasd, then stilled. Warren watched the stillness settle like mist. That quiet afterward when the noise was gone and only breath remained, he liked that part best.
Rain drumd against Warren’s coat as he stood. The water bottle, still capped, hung from his fingers.
He waited a mont, long enough for the weight of it to settle, then bent and searched the body. No Fragnt. No tools. Nothing worth carrying.
Only then did he drink.
No one drank the rain. Not anymore. Not if they wanted to wake up whole.
It carried trace tals and residue from old factories, stuff that never broke down, just passed through clouds and bodies and back again. You could taste the corrosion.
So claid it made your thoughts loop. That you’d see flashes of mories that weren’t yours. Others just bled from the nose and forgot their own nas.
Warren didn’t know if all of it was true. But he’d seen enough bodies twitching in puddles to know that so lies ca from sowhere real.
He crouched beside the figure once more just to study it. The fingers were cracked and bloodless, fingernails chipped to the quick. Their coat wasn’t worth scaving. Just rags layered in hope.
He rolled them onto their back with the heel of his boot. The knife they'd reached for was well kept, clean-edged, cared for. It was small and it seed too personal.
Warren stared at it for a long mont. It wasn’t about the threat. Not really. That blade couldn’t have really hurt him, not in any way that counted.
But they’d reached for it anyway. His knife. Sothing that carried more weight than it should. Sothing he never let go of, not even in sleep.
He’d probably have let them go. Probably. But they reached for what he carried too close. Not the knife itself but what it ant. You don’t try to take that from soone like him and expect rcy.
Sothing hung around their neck, a loop of wire, twisted with bits of glass and old screw caps. Crude, but unmistakable. A symbol of the Cult of Iron, even if poorly made. A personal nto of a world that had already forsaken its bearer.
Warren didn’t touch it. Let the dead keep their charms.
The air shifted. Not the rain, sothing behind it. A pause, like the world waiting to see what he would do next.
He rose slow, checked the line of the rooftops, the edges of every crumbling fra around him. No eyes, no movent, but the silence had changed.
He moved on. He always did.
Warren didn’t linger. The body behind him was already part of the rain, sinking slow into the mud. He moved forward, alone, eyes checking every shadow.
The world didn’t mourn. It didn’t even notice. But he did. Not in grief. In clarity. A threat had been removed. A lesson, maybe, left behind.
He kept to the edges now, where shadow and rot made it harder to track him. His path curved toward the low structures near the waterline, places where the air tasted of rust and runoff.
There were stories about the places near the water. Not the deep reservoirs, they were dry now, but the flood zones, where whole buildings sat half-subrged like teeth jutting from an open jaw. People said you could hear voices in the tide, echoing, glitching from drowned speakers wired to nothing.
Warren didn’t believe in ghosts. But he listened anyway.
He adjusted his coat at the collar. The rain had soaked into the lining, weighing it down. Even a good coat absorbed sothing after hours of storm. He wore it anyway. The heaviness helped him vanish. In storms like this, even the System’s reach blurred.
His footfalls grew softer as the ground beneath him changed, less tal, more stone. Cracked concrete, coated in moss and slow, slick runoff. The kind of terrain that punished missteps.
He moved toward the edge of a fractured causeway. From here, the view stretched over sunken rooftops and subrged lines, old boundaries erased by collapse. There was no border anymore. Just rain and hunger.
On one of the rooftops below, a figure stood unmoving. It was hard to tell if they were alive. Just a silhouette in the mist, face turned to the sky, arms slack at their sides. Warren didn’t stop. Whatever they were doing, it didn’t involve him.
A sound flickered past his left ear, like a wire snapping under tension. He didn’t flinch. The city always made noise. It was knowing which ones to fear that mattered.
A dog barked sowhere in the distance. Or sothing that used to be a dog. The sound ended in a wet, rattling choke.
Sowhere ahead, there would be shelter. Real shelter. Not just a dry patch or a ruined stairwell with plastic draped over it, his place. The pharmacy.
It was half-buried beneath a crumbled overpass, camouflaged by debris and the tilt of the land. Most scavvers passed it without noticing. That was the point.
The entrance was narrow, sealed with repurposed slats of tal and locking hinges salvaged from four different kinds of storage units. Warren had reworked the entire threshold to look like a collapse.
Inside, it was dark. Dry. Slled faintly of old bleach and rubber insulation. That was by design too.
He’d cleared it out long ago, stripped the shelves bare of painkillers and antibiotics. Now it was stocked with what mattered, tools, heat, silence.
There was a generator in the back. Not Green Zone standard. It ran off a waterwheel he’d built into the storm runoff two years back. Repaired twice. Balanced by hand.
The wheel sat wedged in a natural choke-point where runoff pooled and funneled down into a cracked culvert. He’d cut into it, added slats, reshaped the flow.
On heavy rain days like this, the generator thrumd steadily, quiet, clean. More than enough to power the lights, the filters, the heat strip under the floor panel where he slept.
He passed a line of rusted floodlights on long poles, so still faintly blinking like they hadn’t been told the world had ended. One sparked. Another burst, scattering glass into the water below.
Warren ducked under a fallen support beam, slipping between its jagged edges with practiced ease. He never moved fast unless he had to. Stillness was safer.
To his right, sothing floated. A body. Long gone soft, drifting in place, tethered by its own soaked coat snagged on a pipe. He didn’t look again.
He paused as he moved beneath a bent highway sign, unreadable, and heavy with age. Sothing shifted in the dark ahead.
Movent, but not erratic. Not hungry. A different kind of watchful.
He crouched, eyes narrowing. The sound of breathing, too controlled to be panic, too slow for fear.
He didn’t reach for the truncheon yet.
So things didn’t need violence. So things only needed watching.
But he tracked the figure all the sa. Step for step. Breath for breath. Until the rain swallowed the shape again.
And then he stood, because there was no use chasing ghosts.
But the shape hadn’t vanished, it had waited. When he turned his back, it moved.
He caught it in the corner of his eye. Close now. Wrong pace. Wrong silence.
The truncheon was out in a blur, already mid-swing before he consciously reacted. It t resistance, bone and weight, and the shape dropped hard.
It was a Broken. Just not like the others. Thin, fast, and marked with faded wiring scars across the temple, like sothing halfway through a rewrite. The System had failed to finish it, and what was left had just kept moving.
It spasd once, tried to rise, then surged with a second wind, desperation, not strength.
Warren put it down clean. Two more hits. Precision. Then stillness.
But his breath didn’t slow.
The Broken weren’t supposed to be out. Not this early. The light hadn’t faded. The sky was still a bright overcast, washed grey but far from dusk. They moved in shadow, followed instinct, signal, decay. This one shouldn’t have been here.
He scanned the rooftops, the ledges, the gaps in the concrete where water pooled and shadows lingered. Nothing moved.
Still crouched, he pressed his fingers to the body’s wrist, then the jaw. Just to be sure. Whatever was guiding it had already fled.
He waited a mont longer, eyes tracing the skyline around his shelter. The pharmacy sat too close. Too exposed. He didn’t like that this thing had made it here.
He moved to the edge of the slope behind the body and crouched low. Watched the water drain down the hill. One trail of footprints. His. And one that ca from the opposite direction, fresh and erratic. It had been hunting.
He followed the line of debris for another twenty ters, just far enough to be certain. No backup. No echo. Just one.
He circled back.
Then he crouched, breath low. Searched fast. And there it was, lodged behind the at of its neck: a fragnt.
Warm. Flickering. Its edges pulsed faintly with residual charge. He didn’t hesitate. He took it.
This hadn’t been an accident. The Broken had been hunting. Not scavenging. Not wandering. Hunting.
And it had co too close to his shelter.
Maybe it had been drawn to sothing. To soone. Maybe.
It hadn’t been wandering. It had been tracking. Sothing. Soone. And when it lost the trail, it kept moving forward, right toward his shelter.
It had been chasing sothing, soone, and the trail had gone cold just outside his ho. Maybe the survivor slipped through. Maybe the Broken lost its rhythm. Whatever the reason, it hadn’t found what it wanted.
Warren had crossed its path at just the right mont.
Too late for it. Just in ti for everyone else.
Either way, it had co too close. Closer than it should’ve. And Warren didn’t like what that said about tomorrow.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL 1 REACHED]
Warren Smith — Level 1
Alignnt: Aberrant
Unallocated Stat Points: 2
Attributes:
Strength 6
Perception 8
Intelligence 9
Dexterity 7
Endurance 7
Resolve 10
Skills at Level 1:
None available
Warren froze.
The text shimred across his vision, thin and sharp, like it had been waiting for him to see it. Not on a screen. Not projected. Internal and Personal.
He’d never seen anything like it.
The word Aberrant pulsed faintly in the corner of his vision, etched there with a presence that felt both cold and watchful. It didn’t flicker. Just vanished.
Stillness was all that remained.
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